San Francisco Art Institute

I initially saw the work of Louise Stanley, Donna Mossholder-Herresoff, Donelle Paint, and Ann Shapiro in a corner of the San Francisco Art Institute exhibition, “Paintings on Paper”; those two walls became remarkably magnetic for me—without bombast, without scale, reverting to a menagerie of innocent/symbolic/cathartic imagery, the paintings succinctly outshone their surroundings. The stylistic common denominator among them—small pieces of paper adorned by the artists “circled, up,” as Paint says, “over a small, pointed, sharp brush, somewhat like painting one’s nails,” in a complex, personal,